Abducted

Die Entführung aus dem Serail. Metropolitan Opera, 5/7/08. Diana Damrau, Aleksandra Kurzak, Matthew Polenzani, Steve Davislim, Kristinn Sigmundsson, Matthias von Stegmann. David Robertson.

I didn't take notes and am very tired, so this is going to be a bit shorter than usual.

This was one of those Volpe-fashioned "opera and nothing but the opera" nights at the Met. Production and stage direction and stuff took a backseat. Acually, singspiel and nothing but the singspiel, and herein lies a problem. The spiel is already pretty half-assed, Act III is utterly unnecessary and the characters are nothing but stock types. On the sing side, several of the arias seem to be about 20% too long. Add a real actor as Bassa Selim to point out that Opera Acting isn't the same thing as Actual Acting and you have, well, not much.

So the singing is going to be the main attraction for this piece most of the time anyway (unless you're a Regie director--a production I saw at the Wiener Burgtheater two years ago showed how weird this can get). But even B+ Mozart is better than A of just about anyone else as far as I'm concerned, and the singing here was excellent.

This was my second Entführung, and my second that featured Diana Damrau as Konstanze. She sings it with all the fireworks one could desire, from huge high notes to secure low ones. I wouldn't describe her voice as rich or warm, but it has a certain shiny, brilliant glamor. Acting-wise, she overcompensated for the bare bones production in "Ach, ich liebe," but calmed down in the later two acts.

Matthew Polenzani hit Belmonte's second Act I aria out of the park, I thought. It was gorgeous. Beautiful tone, elegant phrasing, amazing dynamic control, the whole deal. The other arias didn't quite get to this level. His coloratura didn't quite work right, but I'm not sure why. The sound is a little too thick or something for the notes to be clear.

In the smaller roles, Aleksandra Kurzak sang all those high notes as Blonde, but I actually thought her middle voice sounded very pleasant. Her high notes are there but the sound is kind of white, and since a lot of the role is in the middle voice anyway this was good. Pedrillo always struck me as an utterly thankless role except for the romance which is so late in the opera that no one's really paying attention, but Steve Davislim was sufficiently cute and sang the aria nicely. Polenzani drowned him out in the ensembles, though. These non-Turkish characters in an ensemble remind me of La finta semplice's plethora of sopranos and tenors. Kristinn Siegmundsson hammed it up as Osmin (he must have a line in Turks, I have also seen him as the pasha in L'italiana in Algeri). He doesn't really have the low F, I could hear some sort of rumbling but no clear tone.

I was surprised at how, uh, rudimentary the acting seemed. Since everything seemed utterly by-the-book (though the Osmin/Pedrillo stuff was charmingly done), I'm not going to really blame the singers here for not coming up with much in the way of characterization. Particularly when we're talking about these non-characters. The set matches this acting, and can be charitably described as basic. Act II looks vaguely Japanese. Not sure what's up with that.

So, yeah, if you listened to the broadcast except for the hearing through speakers part you got the best part of the deal.